1878.] 
Stone Implements in Glacial Drift. 
55 
IV. ON THE DISCOVERY OF 
STONE IMPLEMENTS IN GLACIAL DRIFT 
IN NORTH AMERICA. 
By Thomas Belt, F.G.S. 
S FIE discovery of great numbers of stone implements 
in New Jersey, by Dr. C. C. Abbott, in deposits which 
are probably of Glacial age, is of such great im- 
portance that a detailed account of the beds in which they 
have been found and a discussion of their antiquity will he 
interesting to many. I had, during the past autumn, an 
opportunity of studying these beds under the kind guidance 
of the discoverer of the implements ; and I am also indebted 
to Prof. Cook and Prof. Smock, of the Geological Survey of 
New Jersey, for much information respecting the glaciation 
of the State. I shall, in the first place, give a brief state- 
ment of what was before known of the earliest traces of 
man in North America. 
Before these discoveries there had been many intimations 
of the great antiquity of man in the western hemisphere. 
Probably one of the earliest of these was the discovery of 
the fragment of a human bone which was said to have been 
found at the base of 60 feet of loess, near Natchez, on the 
Mississippi, along with the remains of the megalonyx and 
other extinCt quadrupeds. A full description of the deposits 
in which these remains were discovered has been 
given by Sir Charles Lyell, in his “ Second Visit to the 
States.”* We learn there that Dr. Dickeson, of Natchez, 
felt persuaded that the fragment of human bone had been 
taken out of the clay underlying the loam ; but Sir Charles 
L}^ell could not ascertain that it had been actually dug out 
in the presence of a geologist, or any practised observer, 
and he speculated on the possibility of it having fallen from 
above, into the bed of the ravine, from some old Indian 
grave. This was in 1846 : long afterwards, when the disco- 
veries in Europe had established the contemporaneity of 
man and the great extinCt pachyderms, he recalled the faCt 
Op. cit., vol. ii., p. 196. 
